Polls+and+Surveys

**POLLS & SURVEYS **
There are a variety of web 2.0 utilities out there for teachers to use in the classroom and beyond. Most have heard of Surveymonkey and Zoomerang, but have you heard of the following two technologies?


 * 3 types of polls- Quick over-viewing summaries that recommend helpful ways to use each type of data collection tool
 * Easy to navigate opening menu that breaks up the site into the 3 major polls
 * Each poll lists out the created polls across the left hand side
 * Poll details are listed in the central box: details include a reports tab, editing tab, preview tab, and an embedding tab
 * **//Surveys://**
 * Add YouTube or video media
 * Cool customizable designs
 * Different analysis charts
 * Pie Charts
 * Bar Charts
 * Easily Printable
 * Can add data to RSS Feed to get real time updates without visiting the site
 * media type="custom" key="6471467"
 * **//Uses//**: Gather student information to make informed decisions. Allow students to quickly acquire information for inquiry analysis in project. Authentic data to analyze for class purpose to assess accuracy of other polls. Determine similarities or differences between class ideas vs the rest of society etc.
 * **//Polls//**
 * Add YouTube or video media (links do not work with free version)
 * Limited customizable designs
 * Multiple questioning types available: Easily selectable with visual icons, easily adjustable ordering option
 * Name
 * Email Address
 * Multiple Choice questions
 * Rating Matrices
 * text boxes
 * etc.
 * Different analysis charts
 * Pie Charts
 * Bar Charts
 * Easily Printable
 * Can add data to RSS Feed to get real time updates without visiting the site
 * media type="custom" key="6471477"

>>
 * **//Uses//**: Formative assessment of students. Gather student information to make informed decisions. Allow students to quickly acquire information for inquiry analysis in project. Authentic data to analyze for class purpose to assess accuracy of other polls. Determine similarities or differences between class ideas vs the rest of society etc.
 * **//Ratings//**:
 * Easily embedded media (links do not work with free version)
 * Up to a 5 star rating
 * Each star is associated with a descriptive word (good, bad, average, great etc...)
 * Different analysis charts
 * Pie Charts
 * Bar Charts
 * Easily Printable
 * Can Add data too RSS Feed to get real time updates without visiting the site
 * **//Uses//**: A more detailed way to get student's to communicate opinion about what they think about a single topic
 * **//Strengths & Weaknesses://** Very cool features that allow one to quickly acquire information through the neat and clean visually appealing interface. The polls and surveys are very easy to embed into any website, wiki, Twitter, or Facebook. One major problem is that the embedding feature does not always work leaving blank spaces as seen above. There are great data analysis tools that break down the information into easy to read charts. The RSS feed option is great because instead of continually checking the site for the data, it will be sent directly to the web aggregator. If you upgrade to the pro version multimedia can be embedded into the choices. For the most part this is a great site, but it cannot compete with the cost of Googledocs, which is free. The only differences between the two is the fact that Polldaddy.com has the option for multimedia and RSS feeds where Googledocs does not.



Forms is an app in Google docs that allows anyone to create a poll. With Google Forms, you can create assessment questions in the format of:
 * short answer text
 * paragraph or multiple paragraph text
 * multiple choice
 * checkboxes
 * a list of answer choices
 * scaled responses
 * a grid style response

Once you have created your assessment form, you can apply a theme from the menu of choices and then share your survey either via a URL or you can embed into a web-based tool that accepts HTML code. Once participants are finished with the assessment, you can easily pull your data into a Google Forms spreadsheet; you can either work with your data within the Google Docs spreadsheet application or you can download into other third-party formats, including Excel and Open Office. You can also choose to keep this data private or to share it with selected users.

Here is an example of the data you can get in a spreadsheet:



Here is an example of the results one can get in the form of charts:

=Strengths and Weaknesses= The biggest strength is that this app functions like the pro versions of Zoomerang and Surveymonkey, in that it has all of the great features you expect from a form creation tool with none of the upgrade costs. It's free. You can do an unlimited number of questions. You can allow the user to "instantly" see results. In addition, it works well with the Microsoft Office suite. The weaknesses have been detailed above; an RSS feed is lacking as well as the ability to add multimedia such as images and videos.

=Examples of use= [|click here] for an example of a poll [|click here] for a link to poll templates